Vanished Kingdoms: The Rise and Fall of States and Nations (127 page)

Nonetheless, the true nature of the Nazi regime quickly became evident. The Gestapo and Security Police (SD) proved themselves the equals of the NKVD. A concentration camp was opened in Tartu, and a new wave of arrests and executions took place. The extermination of Estonia’s small community of about 1,000 Jews was perpetrated in January 1942, followed by the creation of extermination centres for imported Czech and German Jews. Soviet prisoners of war were killed in still larger numbers.
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During the three years when the German–Soviet front lay close to Estonia’s north-eastern border, Estonian soldiers served both in German-sponsored and in Soviet-sponsored formations. Before the German invasion, the Red Army had trained Estonian officers, formed Estonian regiments set up an Estonian branch of the Political-Military Department. Two Soviet divisions, the 180th and 182nd, were largely Estonian in composition, as were the 8th and 22nd Territorial Rifle Corps. They were pulled back as the Wehrmacht advanced. A few senior Estonian officers, such as Major-General Jaan Kruus, passed into Soviet service, though every single one of them who was not killed at the front, including Kruus, was eventually murdered by the NKVD. General Laidoner, the pre-war commander-in-chief, was held in the Gulag until his death in 1953.
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On the German side, Estonian recruits were taken into the
Omakaitse
(‘Home Guard’), into Estonian security groups within the Wehrmacht, into so-called Defence Battalions, into Border Defence Regiments and into the Estonian SS-Legion. None of these formations was necessarily sinister in character, and, in theory at least, all were assigned to purely military duties. In February 1944 general conscription was imposed on all males of military age.

Like all other SS-Legions in other German-occupied countries, the Estonian Legionnaires were composed mainly of volunteers. After training, they were transferred either to the Waffen-SS 20th Grenadier Division or to one of the SS-Ostland reserve battalions, where their senior officers were German. They saw combat service in various sectors of the Eastern Front, suffering heavy casualties. Their toughest engagement, in February 1943, was in the Narva sector. The survivors were withdrawn for retraining in Germany, and then saw action in Silesia, where their commander, SS-
Standartenführer
Franz Augsberger, was killed in battle.
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In the summer of 1944 the pendulum of war swung again. The Siege of Leningrad was lifted, the Red Army returned and the German Army Group North pulled out successfully into Latvia in ‘Operation Aster’. The Estonian population was left to cope with the aftermath. The NKVD set to work again with a vengeance, and another wave of Estonians was consigned to the Gulag or to mass graves. The second Soviet ‘liberation’ rendered the topic of Estonian independence impossible to mention. This time, the Soviets let it be known that they intended to stay for ever.

Nonetheless, in the brief interval between the German retreat and the Soviets’ return, a small group of Estonian politicians attempted to organize an independent government in Tallinn. Jüri Uluots (1890–1945), who had been both the last pre-war prime minister and chairman of a German-sponsored National Committee, issued a declaration of Estonian neutrality. On 18 September 1944, acting in his capacity as the sole legal representative of the pre-war republic still at liberty, he appointed a government headed by a lawyer, Otto Tief. The blue-black-and-white flag flew on the Pikk Hermann tower for two days. A party of German marines, sent from evacuation duties in the port to crush the ‘mutiny’, was repulsed. But on the 22nd, Soviet tanks drove in, and the flag was hauled down. The government fled to Pogari, whence they hoped to escape to Finland. Scattered resistance briefly slowed the Red Army down. Tief and most of his ministers were arrested and sent to the Gulag. Uluots and a small company reached Stockholm, where an Estonian government-in-exile was formed. Their principled action was doomed to failure, but, like the contemporaneous Warsaw Rising, had enormous symbolic resonance.
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The reimposition of Soviet rule in 1944–5 sparked a repeat performance of all the horrors and ordeals of 1940–41. A Communist government, handpicked in Moscow, arrived on the coat-tails of the Red Army. Its most prominent figure, Johannes Vares Barbarus (d. 1946), a doctor and poet, had briefly served in similar circumstances in 1940. The Estonian Communist Party was reinstated, intent on wreaking revenge on its compatriots. Estonian territory east of Narva and much of the Petseri eastern district were arbitrarily annexed by the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (RSFSR), the largest of the Soviet republics.

On 2–3 July 1945 a military court of the Supreme Soviet held a show trial to condemn the ministers of the last Estonian government. Uluots was condemned
in absentia
(and died – unusually – of natural causes). His minister of defence, Jaan Maide, was shot. Others were imprisoned. The Great Terror raged once again. In 1944–53,
c
. 30,000 Estonians were consigned to prison camps. Tens of thousands more were arrested, interrogated, tortured, raped, ‘disappeared’ or executed. The largest single deportation, involving 76,000 individuals from all three Baltic States, was carried out in March 1949. Their destination was eastern Siberia. The re-deportation of children who had been taken to Siberia in 1941 and who had somehow found their way home was peculiarly sadistic. Soviet citizens repatriated from Germany and returning prisoners of war could expect no mercy. Low-level armed resistance continued for years.
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One small footnote raises a wry smile. One of Otto Tief’s ministers, Arnold Susi, who fell into the clutches of the NKVD in 1944, made friends in the Gulag with Alexander Solzhenitsyn. Both men were eventually released; it was at Susi’s country home in Estonia that Solzhenitsyn would later hole up in secret to write
The Gulag Archipelago
, the book which would do so much to undermine belief in the Soviet system.
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The pre-war Estonian president, Konstantin Päts, like General Laidoner, was not so lucky. He spent sixteen years in a Soviet camp before dying there in 1956. The exiled Estonian government, sheltered in Stockholm, carried the baton of legality from 1940 to 1992.

In the eyes of the Western Powers, the Soviet annexation of Estonia in 1940 had been judged illegal; no retraction was ever issued to change the official opinion. The 4221st Estonian Guard Company, formed by the US army from selected prisoners of war in 1946, saw duty at the Nuremberg War Tribunal, wearing American uniforms.
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Yet nothing practical was done to challenge Estonia’s captivity.

For forty years after the war, the Soviet Union strove to compete with the United States in all fields, and to prove the vaunted superiority of its system. In 1952 it introduced a model, but totally bogus and irrelevant constitution, and changed the ruling party’s name to the ‘Communist Party of the Soviet Union’, KPSS or, in English, CPSU. Despite such window dressing, it remained not just a ‘one-party state’ but a complicated amalgamation of union and autonomous republics, shackled at every level by the parallel structures of the Party dictatorship. Throughout the Cold War it held its own. Not only was it the largest country in the world territorially; it possessed the world’s most numerous nuclear arsenal, and a vast array of naval, air, ground and rocket forces. For a time after the launch of the Sputnik spaceship in 1957 it seemed to be gaining an edge in science and technology too. It looked completely invincible.

After Stalin’s death in 1953, the crimes of the early Soviet era were selectively denounced, and a limited ‘thaw’ under the leadership of Nikita Khrushchev removed the worst excesses. Yet the essence of latter-day Soviet Communism was immobility. There was no serious modification of Marxism-Leninism, no retreat from a command economy, no lowering of the censorship and no real margin of freedom. In the 1970s, under Leonid Brezhnev, a permanent state of international impasse was reached under the name of ‘détente’.
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Neither the United States nor the USSR was winning the arms race. The Soviets’ former pupil, Communist China, was brought to the fore in the international arena in 1972 by an American diplomatic manoeuvre following the Sino-Soviet split.
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In the 1980s the Soviet leadership grew more rigid in response to the challenge from US President Ronald Reagan, who spoke openly of the ‘evil empire’. Poland’s Solidarity movement was crushed, as previous acts of defiance in Hungary and Czechoslovakia had been. The Soviet bloc appeared to be gripped in the same vice that had gripped the Soviet Union for three generations.
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Throughout the post-war era the Estonian Soviet Socialist Republic (ESSR) was the smallest of the Soviet Union’s fifteen republics. Its territory was essentially the same as that of pre-war Estonia, but its population was somewhat different. The Jews (exterminated) and Germans (expelled or killed) had gone, and their absence was more than made up by a massive influx of Russian settlers. Estonia was governed by the standard dual Party-State system imposed on all the Soviet republics. State institutions were largely run by locals, especially by Estonian nationals born elsewhere in the USSR. The Estonian branch of the Soviet Communist Party was also largely in Estonian hands but it was directly subordinated to Moscow, which charged it with keeping all state organs in line. In reality, therefore, the country was locked into a Russian-run collective dictatorship. Elections were held for councils and assemblies. But since all candidates were appointed by Party-run electoral commissioners, voters were given no meaningful choice.

The history of the Estonian Communist Party, especially in the last phase of Stalinism from 1945 to 1953, makes for sorry reading. One chairman, Barbarus, committed suicide little more than a year after his appointment. A successor, Nikolai Karotamm, was purged in 1950, charged with ‘bourgeois nationalism’. A third, Johannes Käbin, emerged as the Party’s strongman for twenty years. Yet personalities held only secondary importance. All factions in the Party competed to win Moscow’s approval, and all were ultimately dependent on the presence of the Red Army and the KGB, the Soviet Security Service.

Stalinist repression was followed by the post-Stalinist ‘thaw’ and then by the long era of Brezhnevian stagnation. During the ‘thaw’, Käbin’s close links with Khrushchev bore fruit in the shape of reduced food requisitions and improved economic conditions. Under Brezhnev, however, Russification gathered pace once again. Käbin was succeeded by a Russified Estonian, Karl Vaino, who had been born in Tomsk and could not speak his mother-tongue fluently. The official policy of bilingualism did not apply to Russians, laying the seeds of a later conflict. Bureaucratic centralization had the effect that ‘the recipes of all cakes baked in Estonia were drawn up in Moscow’.
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Information in the West about Soviet-era Estonia in this period was peculiarly inadequate. An encyclopedia of Russia published in London in 1961, for example, was not so much factually inaccurate as incapable of distinguishing the wood from the trees:

Estonia (Estonian Eesti or Eestimaa), Union Republic of the U.S.S.R, bordering on the Gulf of Finland, Latvia, the Baltic Sea and Lake Chudskoye in the east; it is mainly lowland plain, partially forested, with many lakes and marshes and a soft, almost maritime climate; Area 17,800 sq. m.; population (1959) 1,197,000 (56 per cent urban), mostly Estonians (73 per cent), also Russians (22 per cent), before the war also Germans. There are oil-shale extraction and processing, electrical engineering, textile, wood-processing and food (bacon and butter) industries; dairy farming and pig raising are carried on, and grain, potatoes, vegetables and flax cultivated. Principal towns: Tallinn (capital), Tartu, Pärnu, Narva, Kohtla-Järve… During the period of Estonian independence (1919–40) the country’s industry declined, being cut off from the Russian market, but agriculture flourished with the export of butter and bacon to Britain and Germany. At first independent Estonia was a democratic republic, but in 1934 a dictatorship was established under President Päts… though a kind of representative assembly with limited powers was introduced. A Communist uprising in Tallinn was suppressed in 1924.
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This entry could easily have been written by the propaganda department of the Soviet embassy. It concentrates on economic issues, avoids controversial historical matters, says nothing of the Second World War, and gives the impression that the pre-war Estonian Republic (but not Stalin’s Soviet Union) deserved the label of a dictatorship. It omits the important fact that both Britain and the United States regarded Estonia’s incorporation into the USSR as illegal.